The Leader 's Companion By Gardner

This semester, we learned specific ways to build our leadership capabilities by reading “How Remarkable Women Lead” by Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston, researching Boston women leaders, interviewing a present day woman leader, and reading a group book. Throughout all of these resources and research, common themes of how to be a successful leader emerged. Not only did I learn more about leadership in general, but I also found ways to improve my own leadership without going too much out of my comfort zone. The important lessons of leading with perseverance, framing, and an activist's mindset thoroughly influenced my identity as a leader and gave me new tactics to grow as a person.

Being a leader is not considered a job or position. Becoming a leader is not a talent, job or position. Although, leadership can be rewarding and difficult at the same time. In today’s society, “the kind of leadership necessary to move social movements forward is very different from the type of leadership required in a military setting, especially on the battlefield. A more sharpened focus on leadership processes versus individual leader traits and behaviors deepens our understanding of the complexities and interactive nature of leadership” (Komives, Lucas and McMahon 2013, 46). My goal is to understand how to face the complexities in life as a leader to communities, universities, organizations, the workplace and the world. As a leader,

I have always known I love change, but from this class, I learned change is the hallmark of a leader. As John C. Maxwell says in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, “Growth = Change.”The leadership assessments allowed me to understand myself in a new way. Because I am a curious green thinker, I need explanations and answers to understand my world. I tend to see the big picture of a project and my mind motivates me toward something new or improved. I am curious about new opportunities because I easily become bored with routine. Learning I have these characteristics has increased my confidence to pursue future leadership roles in a small to a mid-sized position.

Throughout this entire course we have learned many concepts and strategies to synthesize and use leadership as a means of working in a group setting. These concepts allowed us to learn not only how to lead other

This week explored and learned that there are desirable leadership traits to acquire, that becoming a leader can be a conscious process and that being a leader also means to owe respect and have a responsibility to others.

During the first week of the course, my idea of leadership has changed. When I look back at the idea of teacher leadership I have always thought of “assigned, delegated, officially sanctioned leadership based on the authority of a formal position” (Dr.Ausburn, 2016a, lecture 2, slide 4). I did

As previous students of the grade school level,we did not have difficulty recalling how we nonchalantly dismissed the intense atmoshpere that was told to us would come with college. There was a necessity to impress upon the students the severety of the information that we were going to tell them, however the they first had to be captured. How better to catch a swimming fish than with a little bait. Leadership. What young person does not desire to be a leader. Weither people strive to be a team leader or they simply wish to cure cancer they all desire to be at the head of their dreams. By introducing the topic we were goiing to discuss as Leadership 101 the students would focus in on the speakers. There are always those few who make snide remarkes and sneeker back and forth but they pay attention non-the-less. Then the speakers introduce themselves firmly with authority and passion, demonstrating a lack of hesitation and a sense of perpose. This is an important moment for the speakers because subconciously the students acknowledge the personal certainty with the topic that the speakers, who are only one year ahead of them, are there to

This leadership course has taught me to the importance of leadership and what it means to be a leader. That leadership is something that is learned and developed over time. To set goals and encourage those who are involved in accomplishing the goal. Being a leader more than just having follower, but to have enthusiasm, courage, humility, and integrity. This course have also helped me understand how to not only apply leadership to my personal life but to the working atmosphere.

For the entirety of my high school career, I have been a student in the Leadership Center for the Sciences and Engineering (LCSE) held at Norview High School. Being enrolled in this specialty program has strengthened and pushed me academically, as a leader, with public speaking, and as a service worker. Specifically, LCSE has developed my leadership skills and allowed me to become a more service-oriented leader. In the first year of the program, students take Leadership Foundations where the basics of leadership and the history of great leaders are taught. Then, in Advanced Leadership students model leadership skills by hosting holiday gatherings, being counselors for the LCSE Summer Orientation Camp, and completing 200 volunteering hours.

Before this class, I had a very primitive and vague definition of leadership. Not only did I define it as per my views and ideologies, but I also said that each individual has their own definition of leadership. My initial belief was that leadership does not have a clear cut definition, but there were well defined leadership traits which made an individual. I also initially believed that personal traits did not translate into leadership traits with no strong correlation. After going through the various modules this class offered, it is safe to say that I have significantly redefined leadership and underwent a strong personal assessment. This paper talks what I took back from each of the class activities, assignments and how my self-assessment compares to the perception of others.

My leadership vision is to have a strong connection between the core values and vision for where I want to be in the future. Leadership is truly based on your values. Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr. is the author of From Values to Action: The Four Principles of Values-Based Leadership (Jossey-Bass, April 2011). I will list his four common principles of values-based leadership. The first is self-reflection: To posse the ability to identify and reflect on what you stand for, what your values are, and what matters most to you. To be a values-based leader, you must be willing to look within yourself through regular self-reflection and strive for greater self-awareness. After all, if you aren’t self-reflective, how can you truly know yourself? If you don’t know yourself, how can you lead yourself? If you can’t lead yourself, how can you lead others?

While I have certainly learned a fair amount of information in this class, it has more to do with terminology and description of the varying aspects of leadership, rather than the actual process of leadership. I had some incredible opportunities as a young man. I grew up watching men who I still consider to be great leaders, both inside my family and out of it. My grandfather started off sweeping floors as a clerk in Talladega, AL, and worked his way up to a Vice President position with a world-wide conglomerate. My father was a pastor for 30 years, and never hid any aspect of his work from me, showing me how people’s minds operate and how various personalities need to be led. Through watching the two of them, I learned the processes of how to be a capable leader. I also grew up attending John Maxwell seminars every summer with my dad, sometimes multiple events a year. As a young man, it is a very informative experience being taught leadership by the man who some consider to be the world’s foremost expert on the subject. Despite those experiences, I will admit that in my twelve years of management experience I have never been as capable of a leader as I would have liked, though I hope to continue developing my abilities. This class certainly helped to galvanize much of what I have learned previously, and in many places I saw concepts put to paper that I had been unsure how to describe. The exacting descriptions for things such as transformational and transactional leadership, as well the more detailed dynamics of group interaction were extremely helpful subjects for me. This knowledge allows me to have a more exacting description of my own leadership style, which falls somewhere between transformational and transactional, as well as having a better grasp on the psychology of group and team dynamics, which will be highly important moving forward.

During my time as a leadership minor, I have been exposed to countless lessons of leadership. In both the classroom and during retreats, the experiences within the Leadership Studies minor have allowed for a new discovery of the importance of leaders. In each lesson, I have thought about how to use the different concepts of leadership in the classroom. As an aspiring middle school teacher, I consider ways to better interact with my future coworkers and I think of the best ways to teach potential students. The combination of being an Integrated Educational Studies major and a Leadership Studies minor has been mutually beneficial within each field.

An essential component of leadership is to articulate and exemplify the organization's core values. These values must be clear, compelling, and repeated. The leader must both "walk the talk" and inspire his/her colleagues within the organization to also live these values. Values are at the core of individual, group or organizational identity. Values are relatively enduring conceptions or judgments about what is considered to be important to an organization. Agreement between personal and organizational values result in shared values which constitute the benchmarking of a successful business practice.

Starting from the beginning of semester, I was told to write weekly learning update and a personal leadership assessment with leadership goal. When I talk a look of my leadership assessment now, I am surprised that I have changed a lot during this semester. At that time, I thought I was a leader and that I do not need a leadership class. However, I was wrong. I have learned that leaders never stopped learning.